English

Abstract

Plantains are important sources of high-calorie energy in Ghana. They are also of great socio-economic importance in the country, and very important sources of rural income. Although several species exist all over the world, plantains belonging to the AAB group are unique to West Africa and Ghanaian collections have unique features and peculiar taste. Morphological and biochemical characterization are the popular techniques used to characterize plantain genotypes in Ghana. Thus, there is limited report on molecular characterization of plantains genotypes. Characterization based on morphologic characteristics alone may be limited since the expression of quantitative traits is subjective to strong environmental influence. Alternatively, molecular characterization techniques are capable of identifying polymorphism represented by differences in DNA sequences. The objective of this research was therefore to conduct molecular characterization of Ghanaian local accessions of plantain and assess relationship amongst known genotypic groups (populations). This study sampled 40 accessions of plantains representing four popular genotypic groups. Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs) were used to assess diversity in reference to a set of global Musa collections. The 40 accessions of plantain were clustered into populations as being French plantain, True Horn, False Horn, and Hybrid prior to analysis. PopGene version 32 was used to analyze the data. This revealed that the overall plantain population used have Shannon’s Informative Index (I) value of 0.61±0.28 in the overall plantain population,  100% polymorphism for all loci, 2.7±0.67 and 1.81±0.45 for ne and na respectively. Average heterozygosity was 0.34±0.17, loci mMaCIR231 and mMaCIR07 were the most informative, having I values of 0.85 and 0.81 respectively. The Fis and Fit values were both negative indicating lack of inbreeding and the gene flow value was 0.533. The study also revealed relationship among the various populations (French plantain, True Horn, False Horn, and Hybrid) on basis of molecular characterization. Key words: Characterization, false horn, french plantain, molecular, PopGene, simple sequence repeats, true horn.